1. Field
This disclosure relates to charging stations for plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles.
2. Description of the Related Art
The owners of plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles, which will be referred to herein as PEVs, typically have a dedicated charging station at the home or other location where the vehicle is normally garaged. However, without the existence of an infrastructure of public charging station, the applications for PEVs will be limit to commuting and other short-distance travel. In this patent, a charging station is considered “public” if it is accessible and usable by plurality of drivers, as opposed to a private charging station located at a PEV owner's home. A “public” charging station is not necessarily accessible to any and all PEVs. Public charging stations may be disposed, for example at commercial buildings, shopping malls, multi-unit dwellings, governmental facilities and other locations.
In the U.S., charging stations usually comply with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard, SAE J1772™. This standard refers to charging stations as “electric vehicle support equipment”, leading to the widely-used acronym EVSE. However, since the only support actually provided by an EVSE is charging, this patent will use the term electrical vehicle charging station or EVCS.
A substantial barrier to wide spread deployment of electric vehicle charging stations in public locations is high initial deployment cost. Additionally, if a site owner wants to control access and collect payment for usage of an EVCS, the site owner will incur addition recurring costs for EVCS management and maintenance. At current cost levels, it may be difficult to justify installation of an EVCS based on economic return alone. Property owners or managers may install on or more EVCS based on secondary considerations such as the convenience of their customers, residents, or employees.
Throughout this description, elements appearing in figures are assigned three-digit reference designators, where the most significant digit is the figure number where the element is introduced and the two least significant digits are specific to the element. An element that is not described in conjunction with a figure may be presumed to have the same characteristics and function as a previously-described element having the same reference designator.